Diane Duane's 'The Big Meow'

Welcome to the glitzy, murky world of 1946 Hollywood, a smoggy film-noir landscape filled with glamourous starlets, flamboyantly corrupt studio heads, and wicked, pampered cats with hidden agendas; a city of unsolved murders, snoopy screenwriters, scheming PR flacks, and a shadowy, celebrity-ridden cult dabbling in knowledge better left alone -- knowledge which could destroy the world's present and doom its future, if the dreadful promise of the Year of the Black Jaguar is fulfilled...

(Want to read the full "back cover" blurb for The Big Meow? It's now over here.)

And welcome to the weblog for the online Big Meow novel project!

Thursday, August 03, 2006

Revised "The Big Meow" chapter release schedule

Folks,

First of all, let me apologize profoundly for the long time in which you haven't heard anything about what's going on here. This has been a most peculiar summer, and the peculiarity isn't over yet, but at least things are quieting down somewhat.

When chapter 4 of The Big Meow went up in June after a month's delay, I was hoping that things would shortly settle down: but they got more insane instead, with other projects interfering to a point where I had to put the book aside for a little while. Now, however, it looks as if the other projects have been finally quieted down to the point where writing can resume. Maybe this delay has been a blessing in disguise, as some plot points I was wondering how to handle have had time to refine themselves. We'll see.

However, my life is now to be made interesting by business travel, which means that the revised schedule for chapters 5 through 10 is going to look slightly different from the original one, in which a new chapter would pop out approximately every three weeks. In a perfect world, I would have been finished with the book this week, with only one or two more chapters to release over the course of the month. I had always planned to be done by now, as between now and mid-October, Peter and I have four science fiction or SF/media conventions to attend -- three of them in the US -- with all the concomitant schedule disruption that normally accompanies transatlantic travel. However, as we see, things have been running late. But in the new schedule I'm going to try to keep the flow of the remaining chapters as steady as possible.

Here's the revised schedule:



The long gaps between chapters 5 and 6 and between 7 and 8 are due specifically to those convention commitments. In particular, we'll be away from home for the three weeks between August 18 and September 8th, and it's just not realistic to expect any serious writing will get done during that period (though I'll be trying anyway). After we get home from the final convention in October, things should calm down again.

I want to thank you individually and collectively for your patience -- which has been heroic, and a great comfort to me during a period when I couldn't do anything about all the junk that was going on.

Now then: onward.

All the best --
Diane

11:14 AM

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